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On a World Constantly Under Attack, City Halls Are Also Weapons
Our ancient cities are defined by their defensive stone walls and bell towers announcing the city square. In the future, transport rings and laser bows keep us safe. This is the work of Jeff Liesenborghs, whose other spectacular work you can see at his DeviantArt page. Concert By Katharine Trendacosta P'roposals' synthozoic “First off, they are not weapons. They are terraforming machines,” the pilot said as we came to land at Sao One, “The reddish plasma discharge you see is meant to counter electromagnetic interference. As you may know, Strobelight is a strategically important system with a varible parent star. The star’s fluctuations sometimes cause dangerous jerks in the planet’s magnetosphere and this can sometimes damage our machines. These towers, large and small, are designed to counter that.” She didn’t say anything else as we parked at Nyerere Spaceport. It was just surface detail to me anyway. The Ministry of Emergency didn’t have me here to inspect lightening rods. Instead I was here to investigate Nancy Akintola’s death. Akintola was an archeologist at Sao Global University and for the last fifteen years she’d been carefully cataloging Outrider artifacts in Strobelight’s asteroid belt. Her work was routine stuff only of interest to academics. Sure, there was a flurry of interest when Outrider artifacts were discovered in the Strobelight system 90 years ago but, with no technological breakthroughs coming, it pretty quickly settled down to news of interest only to other scientists. Her personal life was unremarkable, a happy marriage to her wife, a couple of kids, no large sums of money or personal enemies. Yet she died from ribbon fire while sitting in her office with no traces of her assailant on building security—a classic locked room. Normally the Union doesn’t waste time on local affairs but Akintola was important. Outrider artifacts made her important. The MoE’s intuition box guessed there something more to this. So they sent me as the human agent (Since this was a human matter.) and my partner, Jack Abacus. Yeah, he was one of those. He was a synth who affected a human personality just to try it on for size. I think the Boss word for it was “tourist.” It was not meant as a complement. But it was Union policy to have emergents accompanied by synthetics on all missions, mostly as advisors. I thought it was mostly for the Management to keep tabs on us. WiessCrack The Infinite Empires The world grew more compartmentalized, As tech evolved to meet our every wish. The geopolitics were soon revised, And city-states sprang up for every niche. Those fragile, fractious nations splintered more, Each tribe dividing, striking out anew, Mitosis in reverse, from shore to shore, ‘Til finally we had nothing left to do: Each woman, empress; every man a king With no more need to socially connect— No interactions, no duets to sing, No further need to mate or genuflect. Behold our empires, like none ever known: The tyrant each man serves is his alone. SpeakerToManimals When I was a kid I always liked to pretend church steeples were municipal shield generators. The bigger the church, the more powerful the shield; the more churches, the better protected an area was from orbital bombardments and starfighter attacks. Up the highway a few miles from the house I grew up in there’s an office building that almost looks like it should be a hangar bay for (Vipers, X-Wings, Maquis fighters, what have you). This was not far from a hill with a number of radio/cell towers built all close together, including one with like ten or twelve microwave transceivers mounted all around this platform thing and facing in all directions - so that one was therefore a defense command post for the protection of the subspace communications array around it, ringed in laser turrets and coordinating the fighters launching from the hangar a mile and a half down the road. Abyss_ Condo for sale by owner. 2bed 2 bath, Open Concept, huge windows, great views, integrated semi-automated cityscape laser pan-and-slam cannon upgrade included! Parking available. R.damascena “Oh my God, there’s so much freakin’ water. Everything’s so green. Look at that one, what the heck.” “That’s a lake.” “There’s like a bajillion of ‘em, though! They’re everywhere! And they go right up to the edges of the cities. Bet you get floods real bad, I know the Fassion Valley Cityplex floods like a sumbitch in the rain, every darn time.” “Flood control is adequate, we’re used to—” “And how come the spike towers are all in the middle? Everything’s so circular, are all the cities here like that?” “The geography of this area lends itself to—” “I for definite thought there’d be more brick, my Grampsy went Back when he was a kid and said you guys built everything in—omigod what’s that?” “That’s another lake,” said the guide operator, discreetly rubbing at her temples. Of course she could never regret the New Peace, not really. But sometimes she really wished the InterCoastal Treaty didn’t let quite so many tourists in.